1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a content management system, and more particularly to systems and methods for the management and deletion of related documents in a content management system.
2. Discussion of Related Art
A content management system is a system that can typically manage all types of electronic data objects including, for example, HTML and XML Web content, document images, office documents, e-mail messages, SMS messages, textual data, printed output, audio, video, and other digital representations of information (collectively referred to herein as “documents”).
Conventional content management systems typically include a client access Application Program Interface (API), a library server, and one or more resource managers. The library server stores metadata relating to all documents stored in the resource manager, and also controls the particular documents that a particular client user can access. The resource manager is where the actual document or a record containing a pointer to the actual document is stored, and it utilizes a variety of services for storage management. Through the client API, the end user's application program can store, search for, mark-up and delete documents associated with records in the content management system, by accessing the resource manager.
In a conventional content management system, thousands of different documents may be stored, and the documents may be related, for example an email and its attachments may be stored as separate documents, as may a master document and its embedded sub-documents, or an original document and its versions. These related documents may provide challenges to the system, as when a user deletes only one version of a document, or only one sub-document and not the other sub-documents or the master document. These actions may cause a content management system to have incomplete data, or may cause errors in which deletion is prevented of related documents.